Visualizing How Terrorism has Changed Over Time

Trevor Martin, a graduate student at Stanford University, has created a series of data visualizations illustrating trends in the type, frequency, and severity of terrorist attacks from 1970 to 2014. Martin’s visualizations pull data on 141,070 terrorist attacks compiled by the Global Terrorism Database, an open-source database of terrorist events managed by Stanford University’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism. The visualizations reveal interesting insights into terrorist attacks, such as how more terrorist attacks have occurred on April 15—tax day in the United States—than any other day, and that attacks have become deadlier over time.